Mayor Tim Davlin today announced he is seeking to make Springfield, Illinois, a wireless community. The City will likely partner with communication giant AT&T to build the city-wide wireless system, although the state capital is still free to choose a partner other than AT&T.
The Springfield network would cover between 25 and 30 square miles, delivered with a combination of Wi-Fi and longer-range technologies such as WiMax. The Wet Machine is not adverse to twisting the knife now that AT&T plans to build a muni wifi system for Springfield, Illinois.
Y’all remember how AT&T (under its old name SBC) launched over a hundred lobbyists into the Texas legislature to kill muni broadband in TX? How it tried to kill muni broadband in Indiana? Not just once, but twice?
Guess what? AT&T has now cut a deal to build a muni wifi system in Springfield, Il. The article quotes an AT&T spokescritter as saying that AT&T expects to close many more such deals, and will seek them out where it makes economic sense.
While I take this as the latest and most potent sign that the move to outright kill muni broadband has run out of steam, I think a note of caution is advisable as well. Some victory snark and reflections on the future challenges for both muni broadband and other forms of community-based broadband below.
I have said for awhile that corproations confronted by a serious challenge to their business model undergo their own version of the famous five stages of grief. Denial (“There’s no way this can seriously challenge us!”), anger (“How dare they challenge us like this! To the regulators to squash this at once!”), bargaining (“O.K., instead of banning it, lets regulate it to create a ‘level playing field’”), acceptance (“We are no longer going to lobby on this”), and profit seeking (“Hey, if we think about it for a minute, we can figure out how to make money on this!”)
Of course, AT&T has been “actively involved” in seeking deals to provide wireless networks in as many as a dozen cities, said Eric Shepcaro, senior vice president for AT&T Business Services. They just haven’t won any.
[Thanks, Don]
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